Sep 27 2022
By:
David Henderson
Another favorite passage of mine from Atlas Shrugged that doesn’t qualify for the blockbuster category is a statement by Francisco d’Anconia. Jim Taggart, who is about to enter his senior year of college, tells Francisco that the millions of dollars he’s about to inherit are not for his personal pleasure but, rat...
Sep 27 2022
By:
Scott Sumner
The "Yes In My Back Yard" movement in favor of more housing construction recently notched a big win in California. One bill (AB 2011) upzones many commercial areas to allow for construction of multifamily apartments. Another bill (AB 2097) eliminated the requirement that developers provide parking spaces in development...
Sep 26 2022
By:
Paul Schwennesen
Adam Smith would smirk. The latest iteration of old-fashioned mercantilism now links, in a ludicrously appropriate way, the fecal matter of Kansas cows with the green activism of California legislators. In a “we-shoulda-seen-it-comin’” development, California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard plan is incentivizing...
Sep 25 2022
By:
David Henderson
Ash Navabi, a friend who was born in Iran and is a dual citizen of Iran and Canada, sent me a present a few weeks ago. It's pictured above. It's the Iranian version of my Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Here's the story he told me. This summer he visited Mashhad, Iran. It's Iran's second-most populous city, with ...
Sep 25 2022
By:
Veronique de Rugy
Over at Reason, Christian Britschgi writes about how federal money meant to encourage zoning reform ended up in the hands of those who want to further restrict housing construction. If you want a recap of why land and zoning deregulation is one of the most important policy matters that no one cares about, read Bryan...
Sep 25 2022
By:
Scott Sumner
Equilibrium is an extremely important concept in economics, but with a somewhat ambiguous meaning. Thus macroeconomists might speak of a "disequilibrium" outcome, where nominal shocks distort labor and goods markets due to sticky wages and prices. But from the perspective of a more complete model of behavior (inclu...
Sep 24 2022
By:
Kevin Corcoran
Given how I’ve complained about how bad economists are at naming their ideas, I should probably think twice about attempting to give a name to an idea myself. Still, I feel like tempting fate by badly naming an idea from the work of Elinor Ostrom, which I believe generalizes to even broader applications. The bad name...
Read this Pierre Lemieux Book Review:
Mar 7 2022
By Pierre Lemieux
A Book Review of Rules and Order, by Friedrich Hayek. Jeremy Shearmur, ed.1 Fifty years ago next year, F.A. Hayek, soon to be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, published Rules and Order, the first volume of his trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty.2 Two thousand and twenty-two marks the publication of a new...
Sep 24 2022
By:
David Henderson
Many people's favorite segments from Atlas Shrugged are mine too. (See here and here.) But there are a lot of shorter segments that I particularly like. Here's one on child labor (p. 92 of the paperback.) Francisco d'Anconia, at age 12, hides from Mrs. Taggart (Dagne's mom) the fact that he is working over the summ...
Sep 23 2022
By:
David Henderson
Hans Nichols, of Axios.com, writes: Administration officials are deeply concerned by Malpass' failure to answer this week when asked if climate change was caused by humans. Malpass is David Malpass, currently president of the World Bank. I favor going beyond firing David Malpass; I favor abolishing the World Bank....
Sep 23 2022
By:
Pierre Lemieux
It’s difficult to imagine how a society of which most members do not believe in individual liberty could become or remain a free society. There must be a tipping point, perhaps far short of the majority, where the mob will seize power or otherwise force its values on the rest of individuals. This is why classical lib...
Sep 23 2022
By:
David Henderson
In a Republican ad during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run for president, a Tip O’Neill lookalike was driving alongwhile oblivious to the fact that his car was running out of gas. The Republicans’ intended meaning was that the Democrats were not paying attention to the mess the country was in, a mess that they...
Sep 23 2022
By:
Scott Sumner
Alex Tabarrok recently discussed an article that criticizes philosophers for dwelling on the past: Hanno Sauer on why philosophers spend far too much time reading and writing about dead philosophers: Ironically, this post appeared directly after a Tyler Cowen post suggesting that the Quantity Theory of Money is stil...
Sep 22 2022
By:
Alberto Mingardi
On a long plane trip, I was reading Henry Kissinger’s Leadership, which is one of the sharpest books ever written by a 99 year old. (Ronald Coase, when he published his magnificent How China Became Capitalist with Ning Wang, was 101!) Still, it is a great achievement and a splendid read regardless of the author’s a...
Sep 22 2022
By:
David Henderson
Aaron Director was one of the first contributors to the area of law and economics. I defended him here from a scurrilous attack on him by Matt Stoller. If you click on the first link mentioned in the previous sentence, you'll also see Stoller's response. When I linked to my EconLog post on Wikipedia on Facebook earl...
Sep 21 2022
By:
G. Patrick Lynch
If you are even slightly familiar with current affairs you are no doubt aware of the humanitarian disaster that is Venezuela. After the election of socialist Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, the country was slowly and agonizingly plunged into economic, political, and social hell as destructive economic policies, pol...